The United States and other Western democracies should intervene
in African human rights problems to stabilize African nations
before they become failed states and refuges for terrorists,
Ambassador Nancy Soderberg told a Law School conference Nov.
5. Soderberg, a former U.S. representative to the United Nations
under President Bill Clinton, gave the keynote address at a conference
on “International Law and U.S.
Government Actions in the Global 'War on Terror,'” sponsored jointly by the Judge
Advocate General’s Legal Center and School and the Human
Rights Program at the
Law School. Soderberg is a New York-based vice president of the
International Crisis Group, an international nonprofit organization
based in Brussels that works to prevent and contain conflict.
Under Clinton she was the third-ranking official in the National
Security Council.

Authorization to intervene follows from the doctrine of “responsibility
to protect,” Soderberg said. For background on that doctrine
she cited a 1999 speech to the U.N. General Assembly by its
Secretary General, Kofi Annan, who said that it is now understood
that the sovereign state exists to be the servant of the people,
not vice versa. There is an “unavoidable” responsibility
to intervene when a state cannot or does not halt the killing
of its citizens, as in the Darfur region of Sudan. But that standard
is “so far ahead of where the world is,” said Soderberg,
because a humanitarian intervention also challenges a country’s
sovereignty. “The world simply is not ready to step over
that line to protect human lives.” Meanwhile, neither can
the world “ignore human rights abuses under the cover of
sovereignty,” she said.

By the fall of 2003, 65,000 Sudanese refugees had crossed into
Chad after the Sudan put down a rebellion in Darfur, she said.
Since then, the United States has declared the killing of Sudanese
civilians in Darfur to be genocide, but nothing
has happened as a result. She praised President Bush
as “very forward-leaning
about doing something in Darfur.” The United Nations has
passed a few threatening resolutions, but subsequently has been
making excuses for doing nothing, Soderberg said. It endorsed
the idea of introducing an African force to keep peace, but the
Sudanese government has responded with delaying tactics, such
as requiring any soldiers in such a force to first pass an HIV
test.

“The dirty little secret is that there is no African force
that can go in there,” she said. Western governments “will
need to create everything but the soldiers themselves to make
up such a force.

“I call this the intervention gap,” she said. “Nations
are willing to intervene in their backyards, in their sphere
of influence, but not beyond it.” European powers are lagging,
too, and were also slow to react to the crisis
in Bosnia, she said.

The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—the
United States, Russia, China, Britain and France—contribute
less than five percent of peacekeeping forces, she said. “The
developing-world nations are doing it. The West pays, and they
deploy.”

The War on Terror has the United States tied down in Afghanistan
and Iraq, causing Africa to be “relegated to the back burner,” said
Soderberg, who predicted that the “new challenges will
be coming from Africa.”

She said the root cause of 9/11 was “the failed state
of Afghanistan,” and that failed states in Africa are potential “magnets
for terrorists.” Neglect of African problems incubates
terrorist responses.

She called the war in Iraq an “enormous diversion
from the issues. But the main trauma in Iraq is over and I think
it will work after the elections. But we’ll be there another
four or five years.”

Soderberg’s book, The Superpower
Myth, is due out next March. Reported
by M. Marshall